Sublime Forum

Preserve Window Group Order Between Starts

#1

Thanks to the way Windows 10 likes to organize its updates (which is garbage), this ends up being a knock-on effect that endlessly grates me. I tend to keep three or so Sublime Text windows open in the group, and while they’re in the taskbar, there’s no really easy way to distinguish them without a hover. Typically, what I will do is memorize which of the three is which, and quickly switch between them once I have it down.

However, when Sublime is closed and then restarted, the order of the windows is basically randomized. I end up having no f**king clue which window is which, and it endlessly frustrates me until I memorize the new order. I would like it to just preserve itself between restarts so I have one less bit of cognitive load every time I start the machine

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How to keep the order of the list on windows taskbar when multiple sublime instances opened?
#2

I’m not sure whether it’s feasible to implement it like you suggest, but here are a couple ideas for workarounds;

  • use alt+tab, which previews the windows and could allow you to remember the layout of the individual windows
  • disable grouping for the Taskbar and use the wider tabs that show a part of the window’s title as well. unfortunately the project names are appended rather than prepended
  • press windows+number_key for the position that your ST windows are at in the Taskbar and repeat that until you find the window you’re looking for. this is probably the worst solution, but works decently well in conjunction with alt+tab
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#3

I’ve honestly already said what I came to say, but I will respond to the suggestions because they might help clarify the use case:

  • Alt-tab is already part of my workflow, I don’t use it in the same situations when I need to click the taskbar because it is useless for those situations.
  • I already use the wide-style taskbar tabs, and I only group when passing a certain number of open windows. It isn’t enough to show the first part of the path, or “untitled”, to distinguish, especially not quickly enough to matter
  • Yes, this is the worst solution. It has the exact same problem that I’m enunciating, only with the additional overhead of having to wait for windowkey+num to resolve.
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#4

(the best I’ve gotten to a solution is to use a per-project theme to widely vary backgrounds between projects. It doesn’t solve the problem, it just makes it waste slightly less of my time)

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#5

I’ve dealt with this same issue and I really feel the solution is for Windows 10 to allow users to re-order applications in a tab stack.

The, admittedly undesirable alternate solution, is to close all ST instances and then re-open them in your preferred order, which is usually what I end up doing.

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#6

(1) You can re-order them by combining windows and then separating them.

For example:
If you have 3 separate windows, each with 1 tab: (1) (3) (2)
You can combine two of them to have 2 windows: (1) (3,2)
And then detach the tab that you want at the end: (1) (2) (3)

(2) Or you can close and re-open the tabs/windows in the order that you’d want them to appear.

(3) Or you can use a third party tool like 7+ Taskbar Tweaker

But I agree, ST should remember the window order. Seems like a very fundamental part of remembering the session, as people use the window order for a lot of things. It shouldn’t just restore windows in a random order. So +1 to this request.

Similar thread:

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#7


(Ignore that the title refers to MacOS and native tabs, I’ve experienced the same thing on Windows for sure and maybe even Linux but on Linux it bothers me less as it’s easier to reorder windows)

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